Electrodes turn your eyelids into 3D shutter glasses

[Jonathan Post] has a way to watch 3D video without wearing shutter glasses but it might be kind of a hard product to break into the market. As you can see above, a pair of electrodes are stuck on a viewer’s eyelids, using electricity to alternately close each eye. The video after the break shows a demonstration of this technology. Obviously a camera can’t capture the image that the viewer sees, but this man describes a perfect 3D image. This reminds us of those ab exercisers that use electrodes to stimulate the muscles. Do you think a 3 hour epic would leave your eyelids tired and sore, eventually resulting and a steroid-esque muscle-ridden face?

Edit from [Caleb]: Judging from the comments, some people believe this to be an absolute impossibility. While we concur that this example is pretty silly (what’s powering those electrodes?), we invite you to watch [Daito Manabe]’s facial electrodes fun.

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As long as there is no proof, there is no product. I can stick 2 pcb’s with random components to my head and blink real fast, telling the world I’m seeing pink elephants. This is about as usefull as a post about scientology.

I could open a shutterglass, add a little HV transformer to the wires that normally power the LCD, stick these components (that are really the size of a penny) to my head and I’d be done. What I find funny is that he turns the 2 devices on with 2 separate remotes. A high pitch sound appears and disappears after a few seconds?!?! OH, haha! now I see! after he “turns the devices off” his eyelids keep blinking! how is that! I guess he is just a blinkmaster who bet he can set-up a hoax using 2 led throwies and adhesive tape. haha. He almost got me! Too bad he forgot to stop blinking after he turned the devices off…

I keep thinking about it: I bet someone could make this kind of shutter-eyelids. I’m not so good with HV, the electrode must be on the eyelid-muscle and I guess you need another electrode for closing the eyelid, but I would call this “plausible”. Fake on the vid, but possible to do. Oh, the freq might need to be tuned down a “little” I can imagine flapping and flopping sounds if I tried to tie 60Hz to my eyelids. Or maybe .00001157407 Hz to make my eyelids close automatically every night when it’s time to go to sleep? Hmm… no…not for me. I should connect that version to my little son.

HAD is posting this as if it is completely legitimate when clearly it is not.

The only reason it seems plausible is because it is possible to incite muscle contractions with electricity but seriously people? There are multiple levels of “totally hoax” written all over this. It’s am amusing video (arguably) but for HAD to post it with the tone and credibility as if they are presenting a fact does not reflect positively on the editors.

I’m SO surprised at all the youtube-esque “Fake!” posts…are we fucking CHILDREN HERE?

How is is so hard to reason that with the right frequency of stimulation, that an electrode could not produce RAPID alternating blinking?

For a bunch of hackers, I see WAY too many “This is fake!” comments.

Hack-a-Day isn’t some fly by night site like “Break.com” or something – how is it so hard to believe that this is real?

I certainly cannot blink THAT fast , alternating eyelids…has anyone here ever used electrodes to stimulate muscles? They can be set to VERY high rates of contraction…how is this so unbelievable?

Just wait – 10 years from now all you guys are gonna be sitting in front of 100 inch AMOLED screens – with fucking electrodes taped to your faces, extolling the greatness of the tech – looking down your noses at the squares who still watch their 3DTVs with OMGZLOL!?! GLASSES?!?

I’ve screwed around with electric muscle stimulators before and I can verify that this idea is totally plausible. If you put it to your temple it will close your eyelid. I’ve done it before. All I wanna know is how the hell are those little things being powered? The muscle stimulators I’ve used were powered by a 9v battery. Even if this is a hoax, I’m sure that the idea could actually be pulled off for real.

Putting aside *everything* wrong with the technology supposedly behind it, the simple impracticality of it, the wear is would presumably put on the eyelids, and all that jazz, there’s a simple, logical way that everyone should be able to spot the fake — his claim that there’s no reduction in brightness of his vision, as though there was nothing going on in the first place (not wearing anything in front of his eyes, all that jazz). There’s a reason why a TV screen gets dimmer when you look at it through shutter lenses — because only half the emitted light is getting to your eyes. That’s the point — half the light is for your right, and half is for your left; that’s the fundamental concept of stereoscopic 3D. Same is true for polarized lenses (“passive” glasses, like in the theatres) — they block the light polarized for the other eye. It seems dimmer because it *is* dimmer. The concept of blinking really fast, in time, if it were somehow to be made possible, is just going to block your entire vision half the time. While you might get a fluid picture (thanks to Persistence of Vision (POV), which HaD has featured products about *countless* times in the past), that doesn’t mean it’ll be just as bright. It’s just like dimming an LED by flickering it really fast — it may look solid if it goes fast enough, but if it’s off half the time, it’s not going to look as bright as when it’s on all the time.

This is just a massively successful trolling, and I wish the entire internet were in on it… but instead, people just try to avoid thinking whenever possible. Come on, guys… just… come on. You’re giving me more of a headache than that guy would’ve had, were he actually blinking that fast.

record a copy of his speech using a webcam.
play it on a monitor in slow motion and copy the lip moments after the intro speech and wink a lot during the speech. Edit the audio and video to re sync, and and not to jitter your head too much (he was almost perfect by the way, hardly any jitter) post you results.

If you watch closely I think the video becomes more jerky when he “switches” on the eye electrodes. I am quite confident he is capable of pulling off this sort of visual effect.

However I have seen exerciser thingys which are powered off a single button cell and these last for hours. I have also seen dog trainers which can produce ~30mm spark and will run off 2xAAAs (3V same as button cell) so I think the package size is plausible.

I just don’t think without further documentation or proof that it is beleivable. If we see it at CES 2012 it would be cool to be proven wrong.